The time of the sun

'One day we’ll look back on it       the time of the sun
when light fell on the smallest twig
on the old woman the astonished girl
when it washed with colour everything it touched
followed the galloping horse and eased when he did

that unforgettable time on earth
when if we dropped something it made a noise
and like connoisseurs we took in the world
our ears caught every nuance of air
and we knew our friends by their footsteps

time we walked out to gather flowers or stones
that time we could never catch hold of a cloud

and it’s all our hands can master now'

---Jules Supervielle.

translation by The Flat Cap

In time we find distances, paths that no-one has used. 

'I stand and watch the rain

Falling in pools which make

Our grave old planet shine;

The clear rain falling, just the same

As that which fell in Homer's time

And that which dropped in Villon's day

Falling on mother and on child

As on the passive backs of sheep;

Rain saying all it has to say

Again and yet again, and yet

Without the power to make less hard

The wooden heads of tyrants or

To soften their stone hearts,

And powerless to make them feel

Amazement as they ought;

A drizzling rain which falls

Across all Europe's map,

Wrapping all men alive

In the same moist envelope;

Despite the soldiers loading arms,

Despite the newspapers' alarms,

Despite all this, all that,

A shower of drizzling rain

Making the flags hang wet.'

trans. D. Gascoyne.

In time we found distances the ordinary stuff of existence, stepping stones that we were unsure of. 

We've gathered and collected for so long now. Through brambles, down past old houses from the 1930s that to be frank would look more at home near the seaside, through the well-worn path reduced to straw and dust, past the electricity grid-is this safe, Ubo?-you make your way to the huge shelter and containers. A thin old man from Goa, all smiles and bobbing face, directs us. 

We walk back, the old sun on our backs but an old memory, from the summer of '76, is something we cannot get rid off.